What would the great world leaders look like, suffering from the deprivation and abandonment of refugees?«I didn't have any exciting path towards Europe. I had an airplane, I had a visa to Paris because I had an exhibition at that time, but that doesn't stop me from talking about the collective problem that some collective community is facing through art.»Abdalla paints powerful leaders with the aspect we usually see the displaced, as a way of confronting a frequently ignored reality that destroys millions of people lives every day around the world. "I wanted to take away the power … to give back those leaders their humanity.”

Painting world leaders together in a rickety wooden boat as refugees trying to find a better future emphasises the shared responsibility for the state of the world.The painting can be viewed as a work in progress, as leadership is passed on and all problems inherited. One can find the faces of Xi, Trump, Obama, Merkel, Macron, Orban, Assad, May, Kim Jong Un, Cameron, Putin, Modi, King Salman, El Khameini. The leaders are often shown in provocative combinations, ironically challenging current relations between them.

Abdalla Al Omari is a Syrian painter and filmmaker, born in Damascus in 1986. He graduated from both the Damascus University with a degree in English Literature and the Adham Ismail Institute for Visual Arts in 2009. During his studies Omari made and collaborated in many animation films, film series and video arts including “The Eleventh Commandment”, a film directed by Syrian filmmaker, Mwafaq Katt. He also participated in the 2010 Damascus International Cinema Festival.

He worked with pioneering Syrian artists Ghassan Sibai and Fouad Dahdouh.

Omari, who fled Syria after the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, was granted asylum in Belgium. He currently lives and works in Brussels.

The urban refugee camp of Yarmouk (in Arabic: مخيم اليرموك), in its beginnings, housed the largest number of Palestinian refugees, forced to emigrate from their own land once the Jewish invaders settled in the region in 1948. This settlement located within the Damascus Governorate, only 8 km. of the center of Damascus, the capital of Syria, represented the largest Palestinian refugee camp of the twelve existing within the country. Not officially recognized in 1948, nor founded by the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA), Yarmouk was established in 1957, by the General Authority for Palestinian Arab Refugees (GAPAR). It occupied a total area of ​​2.1 km, and with a population of around 150,000 people.

Over the years, this camp has become one of the largest in the Middle East. Due to the demographic and geographical expansion of the Syrian capital, Yarmouk is today one of the most populated and important districts of Damascus.

In “The Vulnerability Series,” Omari depicts President Donald Trump as an exhausted refugee, with a sleeping pad on his back and a child in his arms. The rest of the paintings show former President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and several other world leaders as “disenfranchised or displaced civilians.”

“Initially I was driven by my own experience of displacement and the anger that I felt, like any other Syrian, while the situation in Syria escalated. It was a personal desire in the beginning to imagine how would those supposedly great personalities look like if they were in the shoes of refugees, displaced.”

In response to the conflict in Syria, Omari initiated a project in support of Syrian children called “Charms of War” attempting to highlight the destructive impact of war on the lives of Syrian children. Furthermore, Omari has used his work as an active reminder of the huge need to support the Syrian refugees and the displaced.

Images published here with artist's permission (Thanks a lot, Abdalla!)Thanks a lot also to Shirley Rebuffo for the finding._______________________________________
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